|
 By
John Brodeur
In
the waning days (or we should hope) of a seemingly ceaseless
heatwave, one wouldn’t be blamed for thinking summer has all
but reached its end—though we’re only about halfway there.
On the bright side, this is prime time for the majors to roll
out some of their most anticipated 2010 releases. And surely
none of this year’s crop come more anticipated, using a high-expectations-vs.-length-of-wait-time
scale, than Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty,
the proper solo debut from Antwan Patton, aka Big Boi.
That’s “proper” because, as fans already know, his actual
solo debut was Speakerboxx, half of the 2003 Outkast
set with Andre “3000” Benjamin’s The Love Below. And
despite Benjamin’s seeming dominance at the time due to the
odd, inescapable “Hey Ya!” Big Boi’s set was the sturdier
of the two overall, producing it’s own chart-topper (“The
Way You Move”) in the process. So when it came time for a
“proper” Big Boi release, you’d think the label would have
been psyched for what would surely be a massive hit. Right?
Well . . .
In 2004, Arista, the distributor for Outkast’s longtime label
LaFace, went through some “restructuring” and ended up under
the Jive imprint. You can already kind of see where this is
going. When the duo announced their intentions to produce
solo work following 2006’s underrated Idlewild soundtrack,
Jive balked, pressuring the duo to deliver another Outkast
record. When Patton delivered a version of the album to the
label in 2008, the tracks were dismissed as too artistic.
This being the 21st century, however, some tracks leaked—and
there was no indication that this album would be anything
but a banger. Heck, one of those tracks (“Royal Flush,” featuring
Andre 3000 and Raekwon) even landed a Grammy nomination that
year.
The fact that Jive argued over the record’s marketability,
when Patton (via Outkast) has been responsible for so many
millions in album sales, is just a symptom of the deeper sickness
in the industry. There’s no reason this shouldn’t have been
the biggest rap record of 2008—it’s everything you could ask
for in a Big Boi record. But such as things are in the modern
music industry Patton was more or less forced to bounce. And
despite pressure from Jive to block its release, Sir Lucious
has made it out alive, intact save for the tracks that
featured his once-and-future partner.
And just as everyone suspected, “art” isn’t even part of the
conversation. This is a collection of singles: the
producers are swapped out from track to track, the beats drawn
from all over the South. “With success comes a great responsibility,”
Patton raps in his formidable style on “Shine Blockas,” and
it’s a responsibility he recognizes fully with this album
of rhymes about the club, for the club. It’s delivered with
Patton’s steady and professional hand, and backed up by enough
guests to fill a box set. Almost every song features a guest
or three, and they’re mostly great: Alabama rapper Yelawolf’s
verses on the Andre- produced “You Ain’t No DJ” bristle with
the snarky hunger of early Eminem, while T.I.’s turn on the
decadent “Tangerine” (“my reality is your fantasy”) sounds
like the polar opposite of hunger. “For Your Sorrows” breaks
the guest bank with contributions from both George Clinton
and Too $hort.
A lesser artist would disappear in the sea of personalities
but there is little doubt who’s the star here. Even when his
own verse feels like the featured spot (as on “Be Still,”
essentially a showcase for Janelle Monae’s appealingly smooth
croon for three of its four minutes) Patton steps up and resets
the game with his sharply enunciated, unpretentious, often
double-time raps—rhymes are tucked inside other rhymes, rhythms
borrowed from jazz and funk. And it’s done with a radiant
sense of fun. (For extra fun, listen for the nasty between-track
banter.)
 Almost
as anticipated, but for slightly different reasons, is the
latest album from British-Sri Lankan performer M.I.A.
/\/\/\Y/\, as it’s been stylized, could be
the most annoying album title from an editorial standpoint
since Prince changed his name to that weird symbol in the
early 1990s. (We’ll call the album by its proper name, Maya,
here.) What it lacks in Google-ability it equals in quirk:
All the expectations pinned on the artist following the unexpected
commercial success of “Paper Planes” seems to have put her
on the defensive. And recent Twitter flame-wars between M.I.A.
and various music journalists suggest that she’s just following
the age-old tradition of complaining about success only after
shamelessly courting it for years. (If you saw her on the
Grammys a few years ago with Kanye and Weezy, you know.)
In any case: After connecting Google to the government at
the start of the album, she brings us the first single, “XXXO.”
As close to “conventional” as any song she’s recorded, it’s
kind of a great postmodern pop song—her poppiest hook paired
with a disconnected vocal about, well, disconnection. If it’s
her kiss-off to bandwagon-jumpers, it’s effective on a few
levels. For one, it’s got more than a modicum of crossover
potential; moreover, it works as both sendup and statement,
and it’s sonically in line with the album’s part-minimal,
part-maelstrom ethic. (Steeped in ’80s industrial and electronic
sounds, Maya has accidentally brought the name Skinny
Puppy back into the lexicon.)
Maya
is all over the map, per usual: “Teqkilla” bleats on like
an open modem connection for more than six minutes; “Meds
and Feds” samples Sleigh Bells, a client of M.I.A.’s label,
which I think means she’s somehow biting herself; the propulsive,
punky “Born Free” samples electro-punk duo Suicide (if no
other good comes from Maya, at least it got Martin
Rev on the Letterman show). She really shows her hand on “Tell
Me Why,” one of two Diplo productions. A sample of the Alabama
Sacred Harp Singers is tacked to a stuttering snare beat,
the lead vocal pitch-corrected and anthemic. Yes, anthemic—more
than any other song here, “Tell Me Why” has the potential
to help the singer put “Paper Planes” behind her.
Despite all that, it sounds more like a record than previous
M.I.A. efforts (though the credits name more producers than
ever). What’s fascinating is the way Maya manages to
stretch some pretty thin sentiments (“you want me to be somebody
who I’m really not”; “all I ever wanted was my story to be
told”) into an album that’s meant to function as a comment
on Internet culture. The meta-ness of all that cannot have
escaped the artist; few performers are more ensconced in Internet
culture than M.I.A. But that’s what makes it personal, I guess—after
all, this is the album she named after herself. Or perhaps
she’s just trying to say to critics what she best sums up
in the title “It Iz What It Iz.”
|
Site
Search 
